Finding and installing drivers - HOWTO?

One problem I haven't managed to figure out is how you install Linux
onto a box that might have new or strange hardware. Until you find
appropriate drivers, devices will not work properly or just not seem
to exist at all. Is there some sort of tutorial on how to get strange
devices working? Preferably it'd explains how drivers work in general
under Linux - currently either Linux will install and work fine out of
the box, or getting it going is a mystery that involves a lot of head
banging.

Case in point: the motherboard on my existing box (ASUS A8V-E)
blew up. I got the local shop to install a new motherboard
(ASRock ALiveNF6G-VSTA), and the kernel on my box's original
IDE boot disk came up just fine. The problems began when it
tried to mount the two SATA drives that hold /usr/local, /home,
and a big data directory.

The BIOS sees the SATA drives, but the kernel doesn't. The old
motherboard had a VIA chip set, while the new one has the nVidia
nForce 430 chip set. Perhaps my installation (Slack 10.2, kernel
2.6.13) doesn't have a proper driver - I've heard I need one called
sata_nv, while all I can find in /lib/modules/2.6.13/kernel/driver/scsi
are dpt_i2o.ko, ipr.ko, sata_sis.ko, and sata_xs4.ko.

Anyway, I really want to recover the contents of those SATA drives
(not to mention continue using them), so it's obviously time for me
to penetrate the mysteries of Linux hardware and driver setup. Can
anyone point me where I need to go for education?

aTdHvAaNnKcSe...

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